Modern Love
By NIKKI MOUSTAKI
The evening I convinced my boyfriend that he had leprosy defined a moment in our relationship that I can best describe as glorious. Leprosy represented a gold medal in my lifelong pentathlon of hypochondria, and I had never been remotely close to it before.
A little-known fact about hypochondriacs is that we don’t just tell ourselves that we have food allergies, epilepsy and alien hand syndrome (yes, it’s a thing). We are happy to persuade others they do, too.
I had finally found a man who would let me play doctor, so to speak. I would spend hours cataloging his every symptom, scanning his body for skin cancer and looking for medical connections in his complaints that a real doctor might miss.
For example, his feet hurt. He thought it was due to ill-fitting shoes or the fact that he pounds the New York City pavement all day as a commercial real estate broker. So naïve, I thought, running for my laptop, where I discovered that he had cat scratch fever. Just that one symptom, but still, it was possible.
“Please, please, please ask your doctor for a tick panel,” I urged.
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Finding leprosy in anyone but my boyfriend would have sent me straight to that clinic myself, pointing to freckles and birthmarks. But now I had someone to care for and love. I could transfer some of my neurotic energy to him — and, of course, save his life.
My boyfriend said that the leprosy doctor didn’t quite laugh at him, but he did smile for the entire visit and sent him away within moments of looking at the rash, which the doctor assured him was nothing serious, probably just an irritation that would go away in time. I was profoundly relieved for a few minutes.
But if the rash wasn’t leprosy, what was it? And why hadn’t the doctor performed a biopsy?
I took more photos of the small red bumps and typed “rash” into Google images for the 10th time. That’s how a hypochondriac says, “I love you.”
Nikki Moustaki, who lives in New York and Miami, is the author of the memoir “The Bird Market of Paris,” out this month.
A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page ST6 of the New York edition with the headline: In Sickness and in Health. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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